December 16, 2015

The Student Movement, Class & Revolution

The upcoming school semester brings about
renewed opportunities for student mobilization, solidarity with labour, and the
creation of wider coalitions in the battle against austerity. The need to
organize militant cross-Canada action has been made apparent by all the
bourgeois political parties’ failure to take student issues seriously in this
election and their failure, more generally, to represent the working class as a
whole. In today’s economy students make up a new generation of debt owners with
little prospects of getting a job upon graduation and insufficient social
services to lessen their economic disparity in times of hardship. Colonialism
and institutional sexism and racism create barriers to education that are left
unaddressed by bourgeois politicians. It is pressing that students organize to
challenge the limitations of the current education system and work with labour
to overthrow capitalism itself. But what role can students play in
revolutionary action? Why is the demand for access to education important, if
it is not in itself revolutionary? And why is student-worker solidarity
important?

Access to Education and Democratic Struggle

The Young Communist League of Canada stands
in solidarity with all students struggling for free, accessible, quality and
emancipatory public education. The democratic struggle for accessible education
is important to help secure post-secondary schooling for the working class,
which is of course gendered and racialized. Yet, ultra-leftist groups and
individual activists have criticized the demand for free and open access to
education as reformist or even counter-revolutionary. Education under
capitalism, they argue, is not a democratic right or tool of emancipation, but
simply a means by which class position is enforced and class distinctions
produced and reproduced. It is certainly correct that the elite maintain
ideological control of the public education system but higher education
remains, even in its “attenuated state…a public arena where ideas can be
debated [and] critical knowledge produced” (Giroux 18). Universities are often
the first place that young people encounter political ideas and become
politically active. Rather than abandon educational institutions as places of
struggle, revolutionary students and organizations must push to make education
accessible to working class students and radicalize the student body through
action.

The Harper government’s recent attack on
the Humanities and Social Sciences can be understood as a testament to the
threat of a critical education. Since the 1960s and 1970s the Humanities and
Social Sciences have helped to expose the pervasive injustices and inequalities
of the Canadian state and have helped to shape anti-racist, feminist, and
anti-colonialist thought (Open Letter 2013). The view that it is not possible
to win partial reforms in education under capitalism ignores a historical and
existing struggle for democratic curriculum and academic freedom from corporate
and bourgeois ideological control. If revolutionary students reject this
struggle outright, then we are reduced to ultra-revolutionary slogans such as
“smash the bourgeois university”, or directed towards setting up our own
“autonomous” “free schools/skools” which might be interesting to attend, but
reject the necessity for mass student struggle. We should recognize that free
and accessible education ensures that marginalized people continue and expand
their involvement as active participants in shaping the institution and the
political ideas emerging from it. There will not be a qualitative change in the
education system under capitalism away from its primary role of reproducing the
ideologies of the capitalist class, but struggles for reform are not inherently
“reformist” and can be used to broaden the political outlook of the student
movement towards an alliance with the working class and other classes oppressed
by monopoly capitalism.

The democratic struggle for accessible
education is a battle best waged in solidarity with labour and people’s
organizations. The recent victory for free education in Chile is a testament to
this power. After Augusto Pinochet dismantled the public education system in
the 1980s and ushered in a market driven model, Chilean students faced some of
the highest tuition costs in the world. But through ongoing agitation, strikes
and mobilizations by students, labour, and grassroots organizations Chileans
were able to successfully reclaim education as a right and are now trying to
realize the promise of the current government to bring in free, accessible, and
quality education in Chile. The Chilean student movement, in many places led by
Communists and members of the Chilean YCL (JJCC), put forward the demand for
free education and connected it to the broader struggle of the working class
for public ownership over natural resources, in order to pay for education and
expand other social services.

Closer to home, Canadians saw the power of
a united front in Québec. In 2012, Québec student activists in solidarity with
labour and progressive organizations organized strikes, occupations, and
demonstrations in opposition to proposed tuition increases. Eventually, what
started as a student strike over access to education became a broad social
battle against austerity and, with Bill 78, for democracy itself. Members of
the Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante (ASSÉ) in partnership
with the CFS-Ontario also held a Québec-Ontario Student Solidarity Tour in an
effort to spread the movement to English-speaking Canada. Many labour unions
also expressed solidarity with and rallied around the student movement because
they recognized the linkages between students’ fight for accessible education
and their own fight for better wages and working conditions, although the NDP
and right-wing social democratic labour leaders actively opposed supporting the
strike. Donations from union locals across the country were made to ASSÉ in
order to fend off accumulating fines that the Québec state was using to repress
the movement.

Worker solidarity in the 2012 strike had
very tangible political and organizational results, however, the labour
movement failed to mobilize in an organized mass way, and therefore was limited
to playing a supportive role. There were calls in 2012 and again this spring in
Québec for a General Strike of students and workers. As can be read in the
report from Québec in this magazine, worker-student unity was shattered due to
a somewhat justifiable cynicism in the willingness of the trade union leadership
to put up a real mass fight around political demands. However, the conclusion
that some of the student movement came to was to write off labour completely.
What role the student movement can play in the struggle for socialism is a
debate that presents itself again and again. The main thing to grasp is that
while the student movement might have a more “revolutionary” mood at a given
time, it is the organized class-conscious working class that must play the
central role. Labour is organized at the point of production, the origin of
capitalist exploitation. As such it can grind to a halt and even overthrow
capitalist production. While the student movement might be able to put
financial pressure on governments by delaying the graduation of students (the
reproduction of labour power) and accumulate expenses in education costs
through a student strike, this pales to the power of a major general strike or
a wave of workers’ strikes.

The student movement cannot isolate itself
if it wants to push for educational reform or even for revolutionary change.
Yet, some “revolutionary” voices conclude that the multi-class nature of the
student movement means focusing on struggle between bourgeois and proletariat
students, or revolutionary and reformist, and organizing along those lines. It
is obviously true that the student movement contains different class elements.
While very few students themselves are actually of the bourgeois class (owners
of the means of production), there are certainly a disproportionate amount of
students that come from bourgeois families and petty-bourgeois families.
Without getting into specific demographics, we know that many working-class
students are shut out of post-secondary education through financial and
societal barriers. But we also know that the average undergraduate student in
Canada graduates with close to $30,000 of debt, and that enrollment is still
historically high. So we must also conclude that the majority of students do
not come from bourgeois families.

Some right-social democratic voices in the
student movement use the left-sounding conclusion that students have become too
“bourgeoisified” and “privileged”, and therefore a defensive movement position
is necessary. The right-wing is so strong because they have a superior class base
in the student movement, so we must protect what’s left of the student movement
through secretive legal and bureaucratic maneuvers and avoid mobilizations.
Echoing this, the conclusion that some on the ultra-left reach is that the
great mass of students are bourgeois and beyond redemption. Therefore we must
organize in small groups along revolutionary lines against “reformist” student
unions that are a major barrier to a revolutionary movement. Under this logic
some on the revolutionary left refuse to work with the Canadian Federation of
Students (CFS) and with student and trade unions that they view as reformist,
“legalist”, inherently social democratic and therefore counterrevolutionary.
While it is very true that there are real subjective problems inside the
student movement that are holding us back, including ideological problems in
the leadership of the movement, the refusal to work or unite with other groups
or individuals that could be united with is ultra-leftism in practice. The
objective political conditions of the present time are such that the student
movement is beginning where other forms of mass struggle are lacking.
Revolutionary students and student organizations should endeavor “to broaden
every democratic student movement, the academic kind included, and make it more
conscious and determined” (Lenin 1964). Addressing the refusal of student
revolutionaries in St. Petersburg to participate in a student strike that was
lacking explicitly political anti-tsarist demands, Lenin (1973) argued that rather
than abandon the democratic student struggle revolutionary students should
strive to be an “ideological and organizational influence” on newly politicized
young people by helping them understand “the objective meaning of [their]
conflict,” making the student movement consciously political, and directing
their “activity in such a way that revolutionary conclusions will be drawn from
the history.” He recognized the setbacks that, “particular agitators may
experience in this or that university, students’ association [or] meeting” but
argued “the work of political agitation is never wasted” no matter how “weak
and embryonic” its beginning may be “the working class must make use of it and
will do so”.

Ideas have a class base in society as a
whole and are reflected in the student movement. If we as revolutionaries make
it a matter of principle to set ourselves apart and not work shoulder to
shoulder with students that are in motion, if we don’t work to have an
“ideological and organizational influence”, then we weaken both ourselves and
the student movement. This is not a question of “entryism” into a “social
democratic” student union and trying to “radicalize” it. Student unions are
mass organizations not political parties with a set political program. It is
true that political parties have a great deal of influence in the student
movement (see Rebel Youth issue 13-14), but that does not mean that student
unions are inherently “bourgeoisified”, “legalistic” or “social democratic”.
There is a battle of ideas that we should not shy away from in the student
movement and in student unions, and we need to be there. Lenin said in 1903,
when the revolutionary student “breaks with” other political tendencies in a
movement, “this by no means implies the break-up of the general student and
educational organizations. On the contrary, only on the basis of a perfectly
definite programme can and should one work among the widest student circles to
broaden their academic outlook and to propagate scientific socialism, ie, Marxism”
(Lenin, 1964). The propagation of scientific socialism, of Marxism-Leninism, in
the youth and student movement is the task of the Young Communist League of
Canada. It is through this ideological framework that we hope to strengthen the
overall movement, not weaken or divide it. We are not in competition with the
student movement, but are part of it, as students who recognize the importance
of situating the current struggle of students in the struggle for a socialist
Canada.

This fall students in Québec are presented
with a unique opportunity to, once again, extend their solidarity with labour
as public sector workers prepare for major strikes. In English-speaking Canada,
the movement is still fragmented and on the defensive, but there are pockets of
resistance growing. No matter who wins the upcoming Federal election, it will
not significantly change the balance of class forces in Canada and
internationally, meaning that the student movement will continue to face
crushing austerity policies. A thorough understanding of where we stand as the
student movement in the context of the broader class struggle is necessary.
Building unity with Aboriginal peoples, women’s organizations, the LGBTQI*
community, the anti-war movement, immigrant rights groups, the anti-poverty
movement, with groups fighting police brutality and racist policing, and
especially with a fighting labour movement, is key to winning our own demands.
A genuine people’s coalition in motion on the street is the way to resist the
corporate agenda and move to the offensive in order to curtail and overthrow
corporate power. With the ongoing capitalist economic crisis, the expansion of
imperialist wars, and the crisis of climate change, the stakes for working
people and specifically our generation have never been higher. Now is the time
to organize!